Go for Officer right of the bat?

New to the site, good stuff so far. Anyway I just last week turned 17 and have recently begun my physical preparation for applying for the Royal Marines (at the moment just building a good, strong foundation before getting into the hard-core stuff). My current aspiration in the marines is to be a fully-commissioned officer and I'm trying to decide whether I should go straight for the officer position when I'm done with college at around 20, or whether I should try it as a commando first to get some proper experience and then go for it after a couple years. This would however take a hell of a lot longer (perfectly willing to do it though; whatever it takes), what would someone in the service recommend for me?

My advice? Apply as an officer from the outset, it is the only guaranteed route of becoming one.

Very often applicants will find the job picks them rather than they the job. You could start an application now to gain sponsorship whilst in education. There's no obligation to join & you can pause or withdraw at any stage.

In my experience, about 60% of potential Officer applicants fall at the first hurdle - the recruiting test. For some, their future career path and their aspirations are brought into focus at this point. Those that pass the test know it is at least outwardly feasible - those that don't then have the decision made for them.

Look into the specialisations as well I'd say. I changed my application from Officer to other rank because I was interested in being an MA which I don't think was available to an Officer. Ninja is right as well, I passed the recruit test but didn't get a high enough score on some sections to go in as RMO.

Thank you for your insight fellas, what part of the recruitment test would you reckon is what catches the most PO's out? Well as a specialisation I was considering working as a Landing Craft Officer or Weapons instructor depending on how good of a marksman I turn out to be. Not to sure at the moment but there a plenty of specialisations as an officer I find interesting. there aren't that many specialisations I can find that I'm too interested at the moment that are solely available to commandos.

In my experience, the literacy followed by the numeracy are the most common weak areas.

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Incidentally my favourite subjects during my GCSE's were English Lit & Lang. I feel relatively confident for the literacy and I should (hopefully) cope with the numeracy so long as they aren't asking me to find the square root of 999.999999 or something crazy like that. From what I've read the literacy is a short essay on current world affairs and the numeracy is a series of mathematical problems.

Search the forum for psychometric test, theres loads talking about it, plus there will be a link to the practice paper on here somewhere. Personally for me it was the time constraint which got me! You think you're doing well then get told 2 minutes left when you've still got 15 Q's to do!